UK Wants To Ban Computer-Generated Child Porn 544
An anonymous reader writes "UK Home Secretary John Reid has urged a ban on computer-generated images of child abuse, including cartoons. The Register asks if this would criminalize role-playing gamers, and what about Hentai? Currently, such images may be illegal to publish under the Obscene Publications Act, but they do not come under child pornography laws. The attempt to criminalize possession of virtual images mirrors the attempt to criminalize possession of 'extreme porn' which would also include fake images, as well as photos of simulated acts involving consenting adults (as discussed on Slashdot). A petition on the Government's new website urges an end to such plans."
Mixed Blessing (Score:2, Insightful)
Ban bad thoughts too (Score:5, Insightful)
How about realizing that you can't legislate away all the bad things in the world.
The difference is (Score:5, Insightful)
In 'virtual' child porn no children are being abused.
If it offends ME ban it (Score:1, Insightful)
I am an example of an average person, and I take the responsibilities of representing the average person.
Anything that offends me, therefore, must offend average people.
non-average people tend to have these weird fetishes and ways of speaking and bizarre cultural beliefs and, well, I'm just going to say it...the offend me.
Therefore all non-average people offend average people and we must ban them all so that the only beliefs & cultures left are the average ones.
Thus, everybody wins!
You cannot argue with logic.
Where's the balance point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some easy cases for regulation is in the constant sexually oriented marketing and the results it has on children. We like to turn a blind eye to the fact that "adult targetted advertisment" affects the way young developing minds perceive the world. (Yet at the same time, we recognize the fact when we are talking about tobacco and alcohol advertising?)
I don't feel up to making cases against regulation -- I think they don't need to be stated -- I think they are pretty obvious. It's just bad to attempt to control thought.
But perhaps what needs more control is the attempts at controlling thought themselves!!! Better controls on advertising. Better controls on laws on morality. Those kinds of controls might actually have a better chance at addressing the causes of the problems and not just the symptoms. The way I see things, frustrated and confused children growing up to be frustrated and confused adults are the problems and these crimes against children are the symptoms.
Re:I'll be the flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as start restricting anything people do *without hurting other people* on a moral basis, you're already slipping on the slope. I understand banning real child porn because children are hurt making it, and I can understand banning photoshopping greenbacks because the fiduciary system, and society in general is hurt, but whatever people do that hurts no-one should be nobody's business to regulate or ban, including peddling or collecting Nazi-ware, which is banned in Europe for some stupid reason I might add.
Any state trying to prevent you from making or watching Hentai smells of police state. Plain and simple. And given the UK's recent track record in this domain, I can't say I'm surprised.
Re:Mixed Blessing (Score:4, Insightful)
(_|_) - butt of a minor
Either way, I sympathize with the intent but I doubt it will do any good in practical terms.
Re:I'll be the flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The difference is (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed -- argued both ways, no less! It could alter the behavior by making them want to act on their urges with real children more, or it could alter the behavior by satisfying their urges so they no longer feel the need to go after real kids.
Re:Ban bad thoughts too (Score:4, Insightful)
You already touched on this...but I still feel like expanding. Sure, this might stop a few people from creating some hardcore fake porn featuring kids...but a fake child is hard to quantify isn't it? No one is going to write "kiddie porn" on their works so that leaves it up to the discretion of some fat busy-body somewhere to decide. Its a little easier to make the laws featuring real humans, since its easy enough to seperate them into 18 and not 18.
It is a slipperly slope, because once you stop using their actual age as a factor and instead the appearance of their age all bets are off.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Explicit girlfriend in schoolgirl outfit illegal?? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for cartoons, how the hell does a court determine whether or not the drawn picture is of an underage girl, or a "barely legal" 18 year old? And why is this such a big deal? I thought the whole point in stopping child porn is because it exploits and abuses the children. Who is abused when an artist draws pictures? For there to be a crime, there has to be a victim. Where's the victim?
Re:Ban bad thoughts too (Score:5, Insightful)
outlawing child porn to protect children is reasonable. But outlawing thinking about child porn, whether it be in a drawing or CGI is just though policing, and I'm thoroughly against thought police. In the example of R. Crumb, he was originally thought of as a big pornographer, and had a lot of troubles becuase of the things he decided to draw about. But the things he drew, although they were absolutely certainly without a doubte graphically depicting sexual child abuse in a cartoon form, are gradually being thought of as art rather than horrible seedy pornography. His stuff routinely gets shown in art galleries in the US and across Europe now, and consider pretty sides of the human psyche.
I actually tried to bring this debate up at a party, shortly after the netherlands initiated a debate about outlawing virtual child porn (what happened with that anyway?). Everyone at the party (it was an office party, not really friends. I just wanted to bring up something more interesting than the banal shit they were bandying around) was grossly offended at the idea of virtual child porn, and one particularly stupid individual told me that once I had children I would understand that virtual child porn was wrong.
Well, I'm not young, and I've been around the block a few times, and it's my considered opinion that pretending that certain things don't exist, and censoring their depiction or discussion don't eliminate those things. I don't think they even reduce them. I'm not sure of it, but I think open discussions and the ability to confront such things, and other peoples thoughts, ideas, and fantasies, even when grossly disturbing, actually helps reduce these things. It's the same reason I think it's reprehensible that some school libraries choose to censor mark twain, since his work depicts racism. It's anti racism, but they don't care. They don't like the fact that he shows an ugly side of American history.
Put another way, and I guess I'm ripping this off of Noam Chomsky, freedom of speech is measured by how much freedom one has to say things we don't like to hear (or in this case see). Stalin and Hitler were perfectly content to let people communicate ideas and concepts they approved of, but we don't say they supported free speech.
So yeah, kiddie porn is creepy and disturbing. But if no one was hurt in the production of such kiddie porn, it must not be made illegal. Same goes for depicting violent and nasty or disgusting sex acts. Deal with it, reality contains many creepy and difficult to face concepts. If you don't like them, stick you head as deep in the sand as you must. If you want to shelter your kids from these facts, then stick their heads in the sand too. But don't be surprised if they suffocate, and especially don't be surprised when they find themselves unable to deal with real dangers, threats and disturbing concepts that they might one day have to face.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
By not saying "You're prohibited from discussing topics X, Y, and Z" and instead just hauling people off to prison when they decide the line has been crossed, people censor themselves far more effectively.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is always, "By allowing this stuff to exist are we providing an outlet for an antisocial impulse, or are we feeding an antisocial desire?"
It is rarely so clearcut. When the cops bust a pedophile, and he has a huge collection of child porn, they blame the porn for the pedophilia, but it's a chicken and egg problem.
It's my feeling that people who are prone to committing these types of crimes will do it regardless of the existence of these videos, so the creation of these videos should be allowed in the hopes that they'll fill some of the kiddie porn niche that is currently filled by actual kiddie porn.
You can't fight supply and demand. The regular sick exploitive stuff is already illegal, and yet still being made. Until you can find some way to make people not want this stuff, the existence of an animated substitute that doesn't involve a financial incentive for live action child porn doesn't seem like a bad thing.
Re:Where's the balance point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Diverting from real issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me, or does it seem like every time there are real issues that need addressing, but require a lot of effort and a change in government policy, said government comes up with some diversionary issue?
"We need to reevaluate our Iraq policy." "Right, here's a measure we need to fight child pornography!" "We've got an immigration issue." "BTW, did we mention this epidemic of child porn?" "We have to look at healthcare costs" "Look! Kid porn! Child molesters!" It's a quick hot-button issue that allows them to spend immense amounts of time pontificating, while diverting public attention from any lack of work on real issues.
That's not even asking the question of "Why didn't the last 10 laws you passed on this subject work, or why didn't you enforce them?" Which is the question I'm asking of them. Until they have a good answer, I letting them know that I expect them to stop trying to divert me, and get to work on real issues.
The old, what is child porn debate? (Score:3, Insightful)
|_
/ \
So... is that ascii drawing child porn? What if I say it's a drawing of a child?
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Legislating Morality vs Preventing Crime (Score:3, Insightful)
So there are at least two issues here. One is legislating morality. Lots of people in power like to do that. It's not justified.
Second is preventing crime. The theory is if you take a mentally unstable person and bathe him in child porn, virtual or not, he's more likely to actually commit a crime acting out what he's been exposed to. So, by removing the stimulus, you prevent the crime.
I don't know how much data there is on that, but the hypothesis at least has merit for study.
Further, there's the issue of whether preventing said crime is worth the infringement of the rights of those without the tendency to act out their crimes. There's no acceptable regime that can limit the ban to those actually likely to be affected.
Our society is all over the place on this issue. On one hand, someone can't smoke next to me in a restaurant because their smoke probably causes me harm. On the other hand, we haven't banned motor vehicles from roads, where people do walk on foot and a very real number of people are killed by the fact that there are cars on those roads.
In the end it's all a careful balancing of trade-offs.
Re:I'll be the flamebait (Score:4, Insightful)
But that's a bad precident to set, where the majority arbitrarily decides what is and is not acceptable for society. As long as no one is hurt/exploited/etc, society should be able to tolerate oddball fringes.
The Nazi stuff is a good example. Europe is working hard to remove any hint that Nazism ever existed, but is that good for society? I've got a copy of the Krampf on my bookshelf at home...It's an excellent reminder of how some pointed hate rhetoric tailored for the masses can screw up the whole goddamn world. It's especially nice because there is a lot of that rhetoric still in play in the world, and it's good to be able to put it in it's proper category.
Re:It's utilitarianism vs. rights (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like topless men are going to turn me into a Gay.
More to the point, I've looked at porn, I've looked at some fairly gratuitous porn but I'm not going to go out and rape someone.
Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not a trivial point. CGI porn is created by artists who don't have the skills or talent to draw it themselves, not Hollywood-level techs looking to circumvent the law. And their paysite customers are comfortable in the knowledge that possession of images of recognizably non-real events means no exploitation of real-world models. No victim, no crime.
The unspoken presumption here is that what pervs want more than anything is photorealistic images which defy distinction. The number of people who subscribe to sites with hand-drawn furry porn says otherwise.
Maya is the gold standard for images indistinguishable from photos. People take college-level courses to learn it, never mind master it, and the investment of time and money is inconsistent with the ROI they could get using it to make loli porn.
When the police's argument devolves to "this means the burden of proof is still on us," I honestly don't give a fuck.
...because it perpetuates behavior..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's not play word games (Score:1, Insightful)
We're talking about child porn that tries to play games with legal loopholes about whether a child is actually harmed. It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the paedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal". It's the same problem that is caused by allowing pre-teen and teen models to be dressed up as if they were adults by clothing advertisers.
Comparing South Park's creative and repetitive killing of the self-repairing Kenny to someone trying to portray a realistic scene of rape and torture is disingenuous at best. No one would ever confuse Kenny with being real, but when you consider the stellar work done by SquareSoft, Pixar, or the team behind Ghost in the Shell 2, it's pretty clear that we can do the synthetic actors that Lucas fantasized about years ago.
Even Hentai isn't a fair comparison, because while the material is deeply disturbing "tentacle sex demons" ties in with some Japanese religions and folklore. It is an excellant example of a storyline where you don't want live human actors, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed by people who don't understand the cultural significance.
When's the last time some sicko dressed up as a Japanese sex demon and tried to molest a horde of young women?
When's the last time a child got dragged off by a paedophile to be raped in darkness and terror?
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Horror films invoke fear, and many depictions of murder are designed to give the viewer a viceral charge, espcecially of revenge. Clearly fictional works of violence work very hard to arouse the emotions of the viewer.
B) So what if someone gets aroused by a cartoon depiction of kiddie porn? "No child was harmed in the creation of this film." I abosolutly have no tolerance or empathy with child pornographers. I loathe them as the lowest form of existance. But that's because they hurt kids. If no kids are harmed, I don't really care how you get your jollies.
TW
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
A well written book draws you into its story and compels you to finish it. I don't read books so I can observe disparately what is going on in the story.
I for one do not want the government to start down the slippery slope of deciding which of my thoughts should be illegal. Thank you very much.
Another politican jumps on a bandwagon (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Arguing both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
Pedophilia is a state of being, rape is an act.
I don't think any hardcore pedophile will be satisfied with virtual playthings for very long so in the end virtual child porn will not achieve anything more than just postpone the inevitable a little while longer.
You claim willful ignorance of what makes pedos tick and then you try to speak authoritatively about how they think. Which is it?
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
\|/ -- Naked twelve year old girl!
/ \
0
\|/ -- Naked prophet Muhammad!
/ \
There, now I can never go to the UK *or* the middle east!
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:5, Insightful)
"THINK OF THE CHILDREN"
Your post is a series of "yes, but" and "what if".
What if child porn incites pedophiles? Is there any evidence at all of this? No, there isn't. People claim it's "common sense" and site statistics that show 70% of molestors have viewed child porn.
Know what? I'd bet 90% of married men have viewed straight porn. Can I conclude that porn incites marraige?
There is no provable connection, nor is there even anicdotal evidence that shows a causal link.
I, personally, believe that porn is a great outlet for people who would otherwise do freaky things... like that guy in college who had the bestiality porn.... (not joking).
Stew
Words are not Deeds (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's suppose that you're chosen for a jury in a kiddie porn case. In order to render a verdict against the accused, you'll have to look at the porn. Will this make you go out and rape kids? No, it won't. That's because porn doesn't make normal people commit physical acts against others.
But even if it were true, it wouldn't matter. Making pictures that 'encurage' activities is the expression of an idea, which isn't the same thing as the activities themselves. If someone abuses a child, they have committed an act against an actual person, which is justly punished. If all they're doing is looking at pictures and thinking about it, no one has been harmed, so there is no justification for sending Men With Badges And Guns to stop it.
Got that, pervs? Look, but don't touch, m'kay?
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this different from trying to ban violent video games?
Either you know the difference between fantasy and reality, in which case CGI child porn should not be banned... or you don't, and violent video games should be banned also, by the same reasoning you use above.
Be very careful with your thinking, lest it be applied in ways you won't like. Decisions are not made in isolation, and consistency of thought is important.
Re:The difference is (Score:3, Insightful)
While your wishful thinking is applied to EVERYTHING ELSE. Videogames do not make me go out and kill people. Advertisements do not compel me to go out and buy tampons. Reading Agatha Christie does not force me go out and poison people. Reading Mercedes Lackey is pretty interesting, but the Last-Herald Mage failed to turn me gay.
And porn does not make me go out and rape people.
If, after exposure to any of these, you have a hard time controlling whatever impulses you have, then you have a problem that you will need to solve. Leave me, and the rest of the properly functioning society, out of it.
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:5, Insightful)
The potential benefit of a law has to always be weighted against its potential drawbacks. In this case, benefits are imaginary, while the drawbacks will happen immediately. Or are you planning on relying on all artists labeling their art with "child porn here", so that law-enforcement doesn't have to rely on completely arbitrary yardsticks?
Re:I'd like to bring Joe Camel into this (Score:2, Insightful)
For example, although I don't smoke I see no problem with cigarette ads. I see no problem with people smoking openly in public. In a building I can understand a restriction because the smoke doesn't leave, it stays there and becomes a problem. Eyes burn, and I'm even alergic to cigarette smoke. It's unfortunate but it's not the reason for my wanting to get rid of it indoors.
As for the computer generated child porn, how are you going to "prove" the age of a virtual actor? Once they can blur that line, they're free to interpret it as they wish.
It's not about perversions, IMO... this is a rights issue. Real child pornography images has real mental (and physical) harm behind it, and that's reason enough for it to be illegal IMO.
Re:The difference is (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, I'm quite glad that free speech extends to pornography. For the simple reason that I suspect that your and my ideas of what constitutes pornography are vastly different. I have no desire to foist my definition on you, and I expect the same of you. Now piss off and stop quoting the founding fathers - you have no idea what their intent was if it wasn't written down. And what they wrote directly contradicts your fantasies.
Re:Legislating Morality vs Preventing Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
By this logic, 'gangsta' rap music should be illegal in the highest degree.
Take an underprivledged kid, put them on the street and bathhe them in masoginistic, violent, crime ridden lyrics and he's more likely to actually commit a crime acting out what he's been exposed to. So, by removing the stimulus, you prevent the crime.
Now that I've said it that way, does it not reflect on how absurd the argument is?
Stewed
I'd like to keep Joe Camel out of this (Score:5, Insightful)
The Joe Camel cigarette ads, on the other hand, were directed toward the general public and viewable everywhere, including places children would see them.
Re:The difference is (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't elevate "the intent of the founding fathers" to some kind of pedestal. I'm a little tired of the idea that the intent of the founding fathers defines the intractable limits of our rights. They were men, not gods. They didn't intend freedom of speech, or assembly, or the right to bear arms, or the right to due process to extend to black people, after all. They didn't intend voting rights to extend to females.
Re:Arguing both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
MOST CHILD ABUSE is perpetrated by non-pedophiles. These are "situational molestors" to scientists who study this and they are triggered by power and violence. These people are highly unlikely to look at child porn. These people are highly likely to have mental illness.
The rest of child abuse is perpetrated by pedophiles. These are "preferential molestors" to researchers and they are highly likely to be interested in child porn, however, are very unlikely to be seeking the violence/power/domination relationship and often see themselves on the same level as the child, as a peer (of sorts). Within this group, there are actually very low rates of mental illness and according to studies, most in this group are regarded as "highly normal" by psychologists except that they are attacted to children.
Fred Berlin and Johns Hopkins University, probably the world's most prominent researcher on this topic, says that with these people, their attraction is most effectively studied in a similar contest to other, more normative "sexual orientations", and not studied as a mental illness, because it, clinically, has more in common that direction.
The trick is that differentiating these two groups is critical to understanding the issue.
Stew
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:5, Insightful)
Then let's ban depictions that glorify murder. They might be encouraging it.
Then let's ban depictions that glorify fighting. They might be encouraging it.
Then let's ban depictions that glorify violence. They might be encouraging it.
Then let's ban depictions that glorify nonconformity. They might be encouraging it.
Then let's ban depictions that glorify revolution. They might be encouraging it.
Then let's ban depictions that glorify rebellion. They might be encouraging it.
Then let's ban depictions that glorify (enter anything you are against here). They might be encouraging it.
Meanwhile, as people are off looking for pedophiles under every bed, trying to find someone, anyone, else that can be blamed for the ills of their society, their children are keeping busy watching television. They watch commercials for Bratz girls with jeans halfway down their buttocks. They see that the penultimate expression of being a woman is to have jiggly breasts and to have guys slathering like brainless drug-addled fools after them. They see that their parents are liars and hypocrites who treat relationships and marriage like a game to grow bored with and other people's hearts like things to be toyed with. They learn that sex and lust are all that their adults seem to care about.
At least there won't be any nasty pictures of fictional children having fictional sex. That at least is a consolation when Mrs. Clarkson calls up about her daughter Cindy being pregnant and naming your son as the father. And when your daughter is found taking off her clothes in front of that webcam you bought her, for some guy named Chuck in South Dakota, you can comfort yourself knowing that you were dead set against cartoon child porn.
Yup. You can sleep a lot better knowing that you had nothing to do with furthering the problems...
Re:Explicit girlfriend in schoolgirl outfit illega (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
But even in pornography, based on my anecdotal evidence, the incidence of real life participation in threesomes among my porn-watching friends is quite rare, for the most part their wives wont let them go near the nether regions, and people of my advanced years don't have a snowball's chance in hell of having sex with a college-aged woman. Nor do we look for it, because we know our wives will leave us. In other words, it may be all good and fine to suggest that sick and twisted fantasies will lead to sick and twisted behavior, but there's very little evidence that this will actually happen.
TW
Re:I'd like to bring Joe Camel into this (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that if you don't want to see porno cartoons, no one is making you (except perhaps spammers and goatse-style "pranksters"). But if Camel is using Joe's iamge all over the place, I can't avoid it. More to the point, children can't avoid it.
Re:I'd like to bring Joe Camel into this (Score:5, Insightful)
No more so than saying they have an effect and yet not being able to back it up with any reliable measure of said effect.
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, so whether a girl actually was "dragged off by a paedophile to be raped in darkness and terror" or not is just nitpicking at semantics? I think you lack some perspective on what the crime was - doing it or documenting it.
It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the paedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal". It's the same problem that is caused by allowing pre-teen and teen models to be dressed up as if they were adults by clothing advertisers.
So the fashion industry is pedos too? Also, all girls that dress slutty deserve to be raped, they shouldn't be allowed to dress up like that. The hyperbole is getting a little thick.
Comparing South Park's creative and repetitive killing of the self-repairing Kenny to someone trying to portray a realistic scene of rape and torture is disingenuous at best. No one would ever confuse Kenny with being real, but when you consider the stellar work done by SquareSoft, Pixar, or the team behind Ghost in the Shell 2, it's pretty clear that we can do the synthetic actors that Lucas fantasized about years ago.
Get back to us when Pixar and ILM start doing kiddie porn vids. The cartoons you could make up today are almost as far from reality as you.
When's the last time a child got dragged off by a paedophile to be raped in darkness and terror?
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
That line isn't nearly blurred enough yet. How do you accurately determine the age of an individual who doesn't exist except as a virtual construct or a drawing? What if the character's purportedly sixteen but looks like she's fifteen? What if she's thirteen but looks like she's seventeen? What if it's a 30-year-old woman's mind transplanted into a twelve-year-old cloned body? What if it's a shape shifter? What if it's an adult character drawn in chibi style? What if she's drawn from the back and her age is completely unclear? What if it's so dark in the drawing you can't tell what's going on? What if there are just haphazard lines on the page and you can't tell if it's even a person?
What happens when you realise that all you are actually looking at is marks on a piece of paper or patterns of light on a screen, and nobody was actually hurt to create them?
Re:...because it perpetuates behavior..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Proof, please?
By the way, I guess I am doomed to become a child molester, since I regularly see and touch naked children every day as a physician? I might as well shoot myself now and save myself the embarrassment of a trial and then having to register as a "sex offender", right? Correlation does not equal causation. It would be interesting to see some randomized trials before jumping to the conclusion that looking at this art makes you a pedophile. Males of any age are naturally attracted to young females. Heck, there's a reason why women are smaller than men, have more fatty tissue than men, and have softer skin than us. It makes them look young. Attractive to men.
I don't look at this kind of stuff, and I don't necessarily agree with it. But I think this kind of law is a dangerous precedent without any real evidence that it is causing harm. People are being sexually stimulated ALL THE TIME by TV/advertising/fashion ANYWAY. This is just another drop in a raging torrent, IMO.
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the nature of free society.
I'm glad you don't want to live in a free society.
Take your desire elsewhere, because I want to live in a free society.
A victim has to file a complaint. Your grasp of "victim" is deluded so much by your moral indignation at the topic being discussed that you simple shrug and decide to throw methodology and logic out the window in favor of your personal moral interpretation becoming codified in law.
I see only moderate social benefit to religion, for example, where I see a great deal of damage and strife caused by religions which procliam a "one, true" anything that is worth fighting for (islam, christianity, flying spaghetti monsterism)
That said, do I have a right, as a politician (if i were one), to ban religion outright because I believe it can be used in nefarious ways and does, in fact, hurt many people?
Legislate your morality elsewhere. I want to have 3 wives if i damn well please. And i want the government not to recognize marraige as a binding legal contract so they can't each steal half of my assets..... or so my sleazy neighbor can get his part-time-hooker benefits based on a Las Vegas priest's proclimation "I now pronounce you..."
I think the institution of marraige being codified into a legal contract system with a licence to practice..... that's a travisty of justice and immoral in my opinion.
We do not legislate morality. Legislating morality is not how our society was built and not how free thinking people would want to excercise their will. That is dictatorship or theocracy... or worse.
Society should do the minimum necessary to ensure basic freedoms. The more laws, the more corrupted they become.
Stew
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:4, Insightful)
The same could be said about any sort of "art". No, I don't think artificial kiddy porn has particular artistic significance, but I feel pretty much the same way about death metal. At least I'm smart enough to realize that my taste shouldn't decide what other people can see.
Any sort of creative work can (and will, quite frankly) be considered obscene by at least one group of people. The valid argument against kiddy porn, of course, is that you have to exploit real kids to make it. If you can remove the actual kids from the equation, I can't see how you can outlaw it and still turn a blind eye to, say, Grand Theft Auto -- which also simulates the most criminal acts in our society and really doesn't have much artistic value -- unless there is some kind of concrete evidence that looking at the simulated/fake stuff causes people to go after the real thing (and AFAIK there isn't, though I'm certainly no expert).
This is the shit side of the argument, of course, because you're instantly labeled a pedophile, or at the very least against the kids. That's certainly not the case. I just think anytime you ask the government to decide what's "obscene" you're asking for trouble. Let's focus on catching actual child molesters and avoid that mess altogether.
Re:Words are not Deeds (Score:5, Insightful)
A general decrease in the quality of Disney movies. Better laptops. A European Union.
Say, lets roll back all those things and see if the problems go away!
Re:Let's not play word games (Score:4, Insightful)
Our legal system cares; it is the basis of our free society that a person is innocent until proven guilty. To me, this is analogous to saying "the constitution is just a piece of paper", and breakdowns in reasoning such as these are what has led to the Patriot Act.
Fair enough; why don't we ban rap music, action movies, and violent video games while we're at it? According to your reasoning, since they have some small, unprovable possibility of inciting violence in a miniscule amount of people, and since it won't cause global warming or dead kitties, it's alright. We should also ban speech against the government as it might incite riots. See how easy this goes?
Or a potential victimizer. One thing that is always true is that people always want what they can't have. Actual pedophiles probably don't care about this one way or the other; they're going to be pedophiles anyway, and they need medical help. Banning this sort of synthesized pedophilic porn won't do a lick of good for them. For others, I would rather that people out to "satisfy their curiosity" would be able to use this instead of actual child pornography. I personally find it detestable, and would rather it didn't exist, but part of having a free society is the tolerance of others and their rights. I'd rather the KKK didn't exist as well, but as long as they operate within legal limits, they are entitled to their beliefs as well.
That's the really hard part about a discussion of a truly free society; it means you have to be tolerant of others thoughts and opinions, even when they drastically conflict with your own. I don't know about other countries, but I believe America has a long ways to go if it wants to become an actual free society.
Or we can succumb to fear and hatred rather than reasoning and tolerance; it's certainly a lot easier, isn't it?
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paedophilia stats are rising (Score:1, Insightful)
On top of that, pedophilia isn't a crime, and should not be a crime. Acting on it is, and should be. There have never at any time been any person in the US charged and convicted as a pedophile. They may have been charged and convicted as a child molester, but not as a pedophile. And while I'm at it, let me point out that not all pedophiles are child molesters and not all child molesters are pedophiles. Pedophiles have a sexual interest in children and many feel a deep connection with them that is akin to the relationship that most normal adults have with each other when romantically involved. Child molesters are akin to rapists in that they generally commit the act because of the feeling of power and their ability to exhibit control over another person against their will, it has no love or sexual interest involved. Molestation and rape are sexual acts only because that is one of the most brutal and lasting violations of a person that can be committed.
So, in short for the tl;dr crowd. You are an idiot, please go somewhere else to spout your nonsense.